Exchange 2008 Thank You!!

With Exchange now more than a week behind us and most of us
now back are at our “day” jobs, I would like to take this opportunity to thank
all of you for a great conference. With
over 800 attendees learning and sharing in more than 110 sessions and 3
pre-conference workshops the conference was a resounding success.

However, it wasn’t just the formal part of the conference
that you folks came for. There were also
numerous networking events including the Sunday evening Poster Fair, and the Expo’s
on Monday and Tuesday, where you met with other customers and with Progress
employees in a more informal setting, and where you could see demonstrations of
the various Progress products as well as products offered by various Progress partners.

One of the areas where there was a lot of interest was the OpenEdge Advanced GUI, our brand new Microsoft
.NET-based UI technology to be released in the fall as part of OpenEdge 10.2A. The morning workshop on the Advanced GUI was
extremely well attended, and the afternoon one was sold-out.

Additionally, the 4 breakout sessions on the Advanced GUI
were in high demand and I think it is fair to say that the demo performed by Shelley
Chase and Peter Judge where they demonstrated some of the more advanced
capabilities of the Advanced GUI was one of the highlights of the conference.

But there were many other great sessions during the
conference including sessions on the newest capabilities in OpenEdge Architect, ABL object-oriented extensions, database administration, and
using OpenEdge Adapter for Sonic ESB native invocation mechanism. This new way of using the adapter really
simplifies the development process when using OpenEdge and Sonic together. There were also session on using AJAX and other Web 2.0 technologies with OpenEdge. And, of course, there were a number of sessions
which provided you with use cases and deep insight to all of the products that
make up the Progress SOA Portfolio.

Certainly, one area that got a lot of attention was the
structured error handling sessions where over 200 people attended the 2 sessions
that were presented. Both sessions did a
great job of showing not only the basic capabilities, but also showed you how
you can migrate your existing application to use this new capability in an incremental
fashion without breaking your existing code.

And I certainly would be remiss if I didn’t mention one of
my own session, the OpenEdge Roadmap and Strategy session that I presented with
Salvador Vinals, where over 170 attendees where brought up to date on what are
some of the latest capabilities that you can find in OpenEdge, and got some
insight into what are some of the things we are planning for a future release.

So if you went to this year’s Exchange, we thank you. If you missed this year’s Exchange, or just
want to take another look at the slides for a session you attended, or maybe
one you missed, you can find copies of all of the presentations on the Exchange download site or on PSDN. And, checkout the Exchange
Virtual Expo, an on-line version of the
exhibit hall where you can get detailed information on all the vendors that
demonstrated their products and services at the Expo.

In any case, we look forward to seeing at next year’s Exchange,
which will be held in New
Orleans. If you have ideas for the
kinds of sessions and workshops you would like to see at next year’s conference,
please submit them to the Exchange Forum and
in the interim, consider attending a regional event especially if you weren’t
able to make this year’s Exchange.

PSDN Live will
be held in Boston from September 7-9, PTW Asia Pacific will
be held in Queensland, Australia from August 17-19, and PTW Mexico will be held October 9th with other regional events
still being planned.

Progress, Telerik, and certain product names used herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of Progress Software Corporation and/or one of its subsidiaries or affiliates in the U.S. and/or other countries. See Trademarks for appropriate markings.